EFF "Blog for Freedom", and "the very first step you took"
EFF is running a blog event:
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/eff15/
"Blog for Freedom, July 19-26"
"We're holding a weeklong EFF15 Blog-a-thon where you're invited to blog about your personal experiences fighting for freedom online ..."
"We want to hear about your "click moment" -- the very first step you took to stand up for your digital rights ..."
For various reasons of multilayered irony, for myself, I'm reminded of an old "Wizard Of Id" comic strip:
[Panels - king, knight, talk to peasant]
King: How are you doing?
Peasant: I can't complain.
Knight: How so?
Peasant: It's forbidden.
[The joke being that "I can't complain" means colloquially, "I'm doing OK",
but literally, "I can't talk about it"]
But I think I can get away with using the occasion to post two historical gems of the "very first step" of my attempts to get legal defense for censorware research, those many years ago:
My November 30 1995 message to the most famous net.lawyer of the time
("I've found out some fairly interesting information on a hot topic ...")
The 1996 message to an ACLU lawyer written by another lawyer
("I am quite willing to take the risk, but he is not unless he knows he has representation.")
[The first is entirely mine, and the second is posted with permission of the writer.]
Read them and weep. Or at least, I weep. What a long strange trip it's been. As I've said, "It's impolitic and unpleasant to say this, but - it wasn't worth it". Looking back, nearly a decade later, I think I'd have been far better off if I'd never heard of censorware.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in memoirs | on July 22, 2005 12:33 PM (Infothought permalink)
